Giving Students What They Really Need

Arming teachers with new tools will help their students combat the trauma and stress of their lives.

Adversity does not just happen to children—it also happens inside them, through the biological mechanism of stress. It affects health, behavior, and how they learn. For those familiar with toxic stress, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a study published in Pediatrics earlier this month reports that kindergartners with multiple adverse childhood experiences have below-average math and literacy skills, attention problems, social problems, and aggression. Here is one more compelling reason why our classrooms must be more responsive to trauma, stress, and the developmental needs of all children.

We now know that chronic stress, when not buffered by a relationship with a trusted adult, affects the brain’s learning centers, compromising development of skills responsible for regulating emotions, impulse control, attention, memory, goal setting, and planning.

The call for action coming from neuroscientific research has been loud and clear for many years.

But the majority of our schools and classrooms do not prioritize building environments that provide physical and emotional safety, supports for students, and trustful connections with adults. Many children come into school with a backpack full of adverse experiences. Too often, a school environment that should focus on buffering this stress and helping a student concentrate and engage in learning instead becomes another source of stress contributing to the challenges the student faces. And so many of our children can’t focus on learning.

Currently, the U.S. education system draws from a rigorous and well-developed set of academic standards that focus on what children should know and be able to do. However, success in the classroom and beyond relies on much more than mastery of these academic standards.

If academic standards are what students need to learn, there are also skills and mindsets that prepare and support how students learn. Successful engagement in the classroom and in life relies on a set of cognitive and social-emotional tools not represented in academic standards. These have long been brushed aside as “soft skills” that are nice to have but not a priority in our classrooms, yet science is demonstrating unequivocally that these skills and mindsets are requisites for learning and academic achievement. We will not achieve progress without a focus on this domain of student development. There is nothing soft about that.

Our organization works with schools serving high concentrations of students growing up in poverty. We wanted to know how children acquire the skills and mindsets essential for learning, which skills our students need to be successful in school, whether those skills can be taught, and how much adversity interferes with healthy development. What emerged is “Building Blocks for Learning,” a framework for comprehensive student development, grounded in science, in service of equity.

Aimed primarily at educators, academics, and policymakers, the paper identifies teachable cognitive and social-emotional skills and mindsets that correlate to—or even predict—academic achievement. It suggests a developmental continuum that starts in early childhood, but it doesn’t stop there. Our framework acknowledges that children don’t always get the same start in life or follow the same smooth path through it. It makes the case that all children in K-12 need skills, including stress management, self-regulation, executive functions, and growth mindset, and that we can’t just assume they are in place when they enter kindergarten. In fact, we must teach these skills, particularly to children whose healthy development has been interrupted by their experiences with adversity, including hunger, homelessness, abuse, neglect, and violence.

Opportunities to implement a more comprehensive approach to student development are right in front of us. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law in December, requires states to expand the definition of student success beyond academics by using at least one “nonacademic” indicator, such as school climate or student mindset. While there are challenges to measuring many cognitive and social-emotional skills and mindsets, collaboration between researchers with expertise in measurement and educators with expertise in practice will move us in the right direction.